“On it,” replied Norris as he climbed up inside the hull, wiggling his huge shoulders through the narrow hatch.
The spider tank lurched above them, rising up on its four great legs like a prehistoric armoured beast roused from its slumber.
“Norris, you fucking legend!” Custard shouted, and hauled himself up into the innards of the tank.
Ringo followed and as soon as he was aboard, the hatch closed and Ringo was forced to grab hold of a hanging strap of webbing as the tank took off with surprising speed.
“That was too easy,” Ringo said.
“Speak for yourself,” replied Custard, waving at Ringo from across the aisle with his injured hand. “I nearly lost me wanking spanner.”
“I’m talking about after that — our escape. Think about it: the open doors, a getaway vehicle all fuelled up and ready to go.”
“You’re saying we had help,” Custard said. “This mythical Chinese scientist again?”
“Who else? You think secret military labs usually leave the front door open like that?”
“Okay then, where is he? We were supposed to help him to defect… So where is he? Or are you saying he helped us to escape out of the goodness of his heart?”
Ringo didn’t have an answer for that. Custard was right. It didn’t make any sense. If the target had been able to spring them from their cells then surely he or she must also have enough influence to arrange their own escape.
“What’s our next move, Sarge?” asked Norris from the driver’s station.
Good question. They had missed their pick-up by weeks; even their fall backs would be long abandoned by now. After their capture, the British government would have done everything it could burn any evidence of the operation. They were on their own.
“South-east,” he said before he’d even had a chance to think about it.
It made sense. If they could make it to Macau, they would be able to blend in as tourists and contact the British Consulate, but that wasn’t why he had said it. It had just felt right, as if some giant lode stone was pulling him in that direction.
“Do you even know what you’re doing?” Ringo yelled up to the front of the cabin. Norris tapped his bulky helmet.
“Neural interface,” he said. “Same tech as their VR playground only this time I’m in charge.”
Norris crooked a thumb back at Ringo. “Try it out,” he said. “The helmet should be right above you.”
Ringo reached up and pulled the helmet down. It fitted snugly, seeming to mould itself around his temples and pressing soft pads against his eyes to keep them closed.
“Nothing’s happen—” Ringo said and then suddenly he was outside the tank, seeing the world from a new point of view from somewhere between the spider tank’s giant armoured shoulders as if he was riding astride the giant machine.
Ringo looked around, the interface copying his movement and panning the camera around with such seamless fluidity that it was easy to forget that his point of view was just a constructed from a camera mounted on the outside of the vehicle. The terrain around them was a broad valley flanked by wooded hills to the east and west. About five clicks to the south was the village where they had been captured, and further downstream he could see the blocky buildings of a provincial city. Ringo could see the dull silver line of the river as it flowed sluggishly towards the sea to the south.
He turned his head to look back the way they had come and saw the laboratory prison from the outside for the first time. It looked like images of the best and worst of Chinese history superimposed on top of each other. A soaring pagoda of stacked, classical roofs rose up from a cluster of Mao-era concrete and cinderblock buildings.
As he watched, a pair of dark shapes rose from behind the buildings and started to accelerate towards them.
“Heads up!” Ringo said, hoping the others could hear through whatever neural interface the tank was using. “We’ve got company.”
“Drones,” Norris said through the interface. “Don’t recognise the radar signature. Must be another new toy.”
The drones were incredibly fast. In just over a second Ringo was able to make out their shape. He remembered the reason for their original mission. The Chinese scientist they had come to find had figured out new solutions to the equations that kept planes in the sky. It looked as if the Chinese had put those equations to the test.
The drones looked like flying rings, but instead of travelling horizontally like a Frisbee they flew end-on, giving Ringo the unnerving impression that they were being chased by a pair of flying mouths.
Each drone was about five metres in diameter and studded around its circumference with hard points for armament pods. There were no wings or obvious engines. It was as if the body of the drone was itself some kind of bladeless turbine, sucking air in through its ring-like fuselage and accelerating it to provide thrust.
One of the spider-tank’s giant guns swivelled and let loose a barrage of tracer fire at the nearest drone from a machine gun mounted below the main barrel. The drone's ring-like fuselage split into three, nested concentric circles, each one spinning around independent axes like the bands of an armillary sphere so that from a distance it looked like a flying ball made up of spinning steel hoops. The drone easily outmanoeuvred the incoming fire, zigzagging across the sky in a way utterly unlike any aircraft Ringo had ever seen. It looked as if each of the drones’ three rings was capable of producing thrust, allowing the crazy machine to move in any direction almost instantaneously by reorienting the pitch of its rings.
“Fuck, that thing's fast,” said Custard as the burst of tracer fire arced well wide of his intended target.
The spider-tank accelerated, both guns whirling around to track the incoming drones. The body of the tank offered a stable gun platform, the great legs easily coping with the recoil from the guns as well as smoothing out the curves of the terrain as Norris urged the vehicle to even greater speed. Despite that, they failed to land even a single round on the attacking drones.
“Can’t shoot ‘em, can’t outrun ‘em,” said Custard. “I hope this thing’s got decent armour.”
They didn’t have to wait long to find out. The first drone unleashed a storm of fire from three of the armament pods on its outer ring. It was like being hit by the Gatling gun on an A-10 tank buster. Chips of ablative armour flew in every direction. Custard returned fire, but the drone snapped its three rings back into one concentric disc, combining their thrust, and raced away at a speed that would have turned any human pilot to paste.
The tank rocked beneath Ringo as the supersonic shock wave rolled over them. The two main guns spun crazily as Custard tried to keep the fast-moving ship in his sights.
“Brace yourselves,” Ringo shouted as the second drone attacked with a barrage of tiny missiles. Norris threw the tank to the right, its ball-like wheels allowing the big machine to move with surprising agility, but it wasn’t enough. The missiles struck the tank’s hull, tearing off great sheets of armour. They struck the ground between the tank’s legs, blowing chunks of earth skyward and nearly flipping the tank onto its back. And at least two of the high-explosive projectiles struck the tank’s right, rear leg.
“We’re hit,” Norris shouted.
Ringo tried to see the right rear leg, but he couldn’t see over the angular facets of the hull’s hip joint. He urged his vision upwards, as if craning his neck was possible with his robotic camera and suddenly his viewpoint burst upwards into the sky. He could see the whole tank plus a good chunk of the landscape around them.
“Holy shit,” said Custard. “I guess the bad guys aren’t the only ones with drones. Sarge, I think you just launched some kind of an overwatch camera.”